


Lapdog

by NightsMistress



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-19
Updated: 2015-09-19
Packaged: 2018-04-21 11:12:01
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4826945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ultimecia needs a tool to bring Garden down and subdue Edea. She finds both in Seifer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lapdog

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Wallwalker](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wallwalker/gifts).



> Wallwalker, I saw you on the pinch hit list for so long and I really wanted to write you a treat as being on a pinch hit list can really suck. I didn't know your fandoms for this exchange, so I grabbed a prompt from Rare Pairs that fit the theme of this exchange. I hope that's okay!

Ultimecia had expected that the broadcast from Timber would be a boring affair. She had little interest in Deling’s delusions that he would remain in power, and had watched it purely because there was little else to do. Edea was subdued, and while she could go into the city and see what it looked like, she didn’t see the need. It would be nothingness when she finished.

She was pleasantly surprised when the wretched SeeD broke in. Not for them, of course. She hated them and their role in causing humanity to hate Sorceresses. It was the way that Edea went from passively observing to a fury fueled by fear. Her children, it seemed, were on the screen, all grown up and waiting to be used.

Waiting for her. She would not pass up the opportunity.

A Sorceress’ Knight was a quaint custom for a gentler time, a time where sorceresses hadn’t been hunted down for generations. A time when sorceresses wanted to remember humans, and didn’t need to throw themselves into the maelstrom that was their power and dance with it.

Ultimecia had no knight. She needed no knight.

But in this time she could not be everywhere, and she needed a tool to extend her reach. One of the children on the screen would serve well enough, both to bring the military under her heel, and crush Edea’s resistance once and for all. Not the Galbadian girl, though she would need another way to tie off the loose end that was Caraway. The others. The boy holding a sword to Ultimecia’s catspaw’s throat. The four SeeD. She could see Edea refuse to look, and forced her to see her children grown ripe for the harvest.

 _Choose,_ she commanded Edea. _Choose which child becomes my knight._

Edea remained mute, but that meant nothing. Ultimecia’s power had been honed on the whetstone of generations of fear and hatred, and so she could carve through Edea’s resistance as if it were tissue paper. She had only made the demand so that Edea would think of her children, making it easy for Ultimecia to pluck the best choice from her thoughts. Edea’s angry misery at the violation was not unexpected, but also not unwelcome. Cursed sorceress, how dare she hide her power away to run an orphanage? She was a vessel of Hyne’s power!

The girls she dismissed immediately. Edea had identified them as having unique magical power, one able to channel the magic of monsters and the other able to conjure special magic in times of need, and that was a hallmark of a potential sorceress. Pouring her own power into the girls could awaken them as successors to Hyne, and she did not want a rival in this time. Not while they did not remember whose body she wore.

The boys … one had grown up loved and cherished; she would not have time to break his mind to her will. Besides, why would she bother when she had two far easier targets in front of her: the quiet loner and the passionate rebel who wanted a cause. One cried for a sister gone and froze others out, the other burned for a sorceress to serve. Ice and fire, and both unloved.

She was always better with fire.

Edea’s misery as Ultimecia plundered her memories of her firebrand child was palpable, a keening grieving sob that went on and on as Ultimecia learned how to make this Seifer Almasy hers. It would be easy; he had been trapped in the Sorceress-killing school for almost all of his life, abandoned by every guardian. He wanted a lover, a mother, a goddess. Ultimecia could pretend to be these things for him.

 _Why do you weep?_ she asked Edea. _You moulded him to be my knight._

 _You wouldn’t understand,_ Edea said bitterly. _But you will._

Foolish. Edea only had words left to her, and she used them in pitiful games of defiance. Ultimecia had no time for them. She stepped through from their chambers to the television station half a continent away, and claimed her Knight.

*

Ultimecia had time to train him, time between the aborted attempt on Deling and her inauguration ceremony, and he was eager to learn. At first she was the smiling sorceress from his dreams, a powerful woman who sought an equally powerful knight to guard her against a cruel and unfair world who hated sorceresses. He’d liked that, and the praise she gave him when he showed her how powerful he was.

Edea schemed, but that was not important. Her scheming was impotent, as Ultimecia’s will was stronger than Edea’s and she could crush her futile little hopes at any time. What matter was it that the other children knew that there was an active sorceress in Galbadia? None of them could stop her, and if they came close she could weave together the memories they had lost and show them who they were fighting.

Besides, the boy knew Garden, had been there since its inception, and after spilling everything he knew, she knew how to break their stranglehold on the future. Galbadia Garden was as good as hers, and he could give her the others. She took him to her bed as a reward, smiling as Edea screamed, and showed him another way he could please her.

The boy was, for all his posturing, very biddable. Eager to please, even if he pretended he was not.

She indulged his moods when it amused her and punished him when it did not. He learned quickly to read the tide of her desires. It still caught up in his dream of a sorceress who was kind and loving, but who had been burned badly by a world who hated and feared her. He promised his love and devotion, his gunblade to the throat of anyone who defied her, a torch to any city that would not open its gates to her. He would see the world burn if it was what she desired, by the time she was finished teaching him obedience.

By the time she was ready to take the stage in Deling City, she had brought her dog to heel, his sharp teeth and claws dedicated to serving her and only her.

She led out the leash and the boy attacked on her command. SeeD could not be allowed to flourish, its fertile ground had to polluted, and using one of their own was the salt in the earth. Without Garden, SeeD could not grow. He savaged friend and foe, and then returned to her as she petted his hair and told him what a good Knight he had been for her.

She trained the boy when he failed, withdrawing her power from his mind and leaving him aching in need. He mistook it for love and devoted himself more to her to win back her favour. He begged for her forgiveness and promised to make amends, to be better. She bestowed her power on him, small dollops of it to steer him towards the knight she wanted.

He thought she loved him. She did, because he was a part of her, though a part she could sever if it failed her. He strived to please her, and Ultimecia knew that this was how it should be. Sorceresses were the successors to Hyne’s power, and should be treasured. The fact that they were not, and that humanity would always seek to root them out, was why time had to be compressed. Only then would a sorceress reign supreme, as she should.

The failures stacked up. He failed to see Balamb destroyed. He failed to see that accursed SeeD, Squall, dead. He failed, despite everything she had taught him, and the only explanation that for all that she had done for him, the way that she had trained him to be better than the weak, SeeD cadet she had found in Timber, was because he was a fundamentally flawed tool.

Then he fell, and she was forced to revive him through Caraway’s daughter.

“Salvage Lunatic Pandora, and junction this sorceress with Adel” she said. “Only then can you become my Knight again.”

He stared at her, gaze half-crazed with pain and grief, and she thought maybe she should put him down. Dogs that turned rabid had to be euthanized sooner rather than later.

However, she had some residual fondness for him. A deranged man would do terrible things for love, and terror was what she needed. She would not fall now. She kissed him, and felt him shudder at the touch.

“Go,” she said gently, and he shook more at her sweet gentleness and the promise of what it could mean. “Earn my favour back.”

*

After time returned to normal, Edea found Seifer washed up on the shore near the orphanage, deeply unconscious and without any physical on him. His clothes and hair were dry, but he was drenched with the acrid stink of time compression. It wasn’t surprising; he had been at the centre of it, and even a half-complete compression of time left its mark.

She knelt in the sand and smoothed his hair out of his face. There were lines between his eyebrows even now as he slept, and she wondered what he dreamed of. Was it the world he had dreamed of, that he had hoped that Ultimecia would create for him? What would that world have been like?

She had known his heart once, when he was a small angry child and before she had sent him off to Cid’s Garden. Too many years had passed since then. She really didn’t know.

She cast healing spells on him, made contact with her husband, and sat down next to him. There were no monsters here, not in Edea’s safe harbour, but she wanted to sit guard over him until he woke once more.

She watched the waves, the fins of sea creatures as they came to surface for air, and tried to find peace in what she saw. Ultimecia had committed great atrocities in Edea’s name, and there was a part of Edea that knew what it was like to wield that kind of power, and why. She was loved by her husband, cherished by her children, and had kept Ellone safe. A sorceress without any kind of hope of a happy life …

Edea watched the ocean and reminded herself that Ultimecia was gone and that she was loved.

Seifer stirred by mid-morning, awakening disoriented and frightened. She remained still as he took in the surroundings, military training kicking in even now to advise him whether he had been captured or not. It hurt that Cid had had to train her children to be soldiers to stop her.

He sat up, turned to look at her and she could see the shame and fury in his eyes.

“Hello, Seifer,” she said. “How are you feeling?”

There was nothing else she could really say. He had been hollowed out by his most cherished dream, and it had been her hand that had guided the carving. He had chosen to go with Ultimecia, and through that choice everything had unravelled. It had been a terrible choice, and one that was in part Edea’s fault. She should have resisted Ultimecia. Keeping Ellone safe to safeguard time, keeping Squall safe so that he could travel back to the orphanage and tell her what was to come … these were necessary things. Breaking Seifer was necessary.

She wished it hadn’t have been.

Something of that must have shown on her face, as Seifer recoiled violently from her. “I don’t need your pity,” he snarled. “I need a way to leave.”

“Raijin and Fuujin are on their way by air,” she said. “They were worried for you.”

Seifer growled, a frustrated noise at the world in general rather than at Edea herself. When time had compressed and Seifer’s mind began to unravel, it had been Edea, Raijin and Fuujin whose love had stepped in to shield him.

“From Garden?” he asked. He snorted. “Yeah, so I can go back for a execution.”

“No,” Edea said. “Garden has pardoned us for our … involvement.”

“Hah,” Seifer barked mirthlessly.

“Galbadia has not,” Edea went on. “But you are free to travel anywhere you wish so long as it is not held by Galbadia.”

“I hated that place anyway,” Seifer said. “Once, I would have reduced it to rubble if I could.”

“Yes,” Edea agreed. “But you didn’t. Please, sit with me until they come.”

She thought for a moment that Seifer would refuse, that his memories of her as Ultimecia would be too much to bear and that the coiled tension inside him would cause him to run anywhere but by her side.. He didn’t.

Together they sat, and waited, as the tide came in.


End file.
